Invitation to Openness
As the art historian and artist David Driskell stated, “The process of sharing begins with openness and generosity … the idea that we were collaborating in the studio meant that we had a shared sensibility to the artistic quest.” Conceived as a response to David C. Driskell and Friends, this exhibition invites further reflection on the potentials, aesthetics, and ethics of cocreation, but in another medium: music.
Invitation to Openness is a listening room and a site of observation—a space dedicated to a small number of artists and musicians whose commitments to collaborative practice rippled outward into the world around them. At its core are listening stations featuring music from a constellation of landmark jazz collectives and solo avant-garde practitioners active primarily from the 1960s onward, whose work and legacy continue to resonate, alongside their creative descendants in hip-hop and a range of experimental music scenes, including in Miami. Artists and ensembles such as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the Sun Ra Arkestra, the Black Artists’ Group (BAG), and Mongo Santamaria, among others, pursued improvisational techniques and experimental approaches to sound while rooting their practices in the places and people around them. In conjunction with these sonic contributions, the exhibition offers visual works by Terry Adkins, Sam Gilliam, Masimba Hwati, Bertina Lopes, and Pauline Oliveros, whose practices deepen considerations of improvisation, listening, and history.
In borrowing its title from jazz pianist Les McCann’s 1972 album, Invitation to Openness extends an inquiry into the ways collaboration can give rise to new kinds of art and new kinds of relationships. Invitation is not a comprehensive statement, but it’s not simply a rehearsal. Rather, it’s an initial offering, a first take that begins to sound out how all things are interconnected cocreatively.
Invitation to Openness is co-curated by Natalia Zuluaga, Chief Curator, and Graham Eng-Wilmot, independent scholar and researcher. The exhibition’s guiding ideas were shaped in part by The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (2013) by Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz, and ongoing conversations with scholars and musicians whose generosity informs this work.
The exhibition is supported by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the Members of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum; and the Green Family Foundation.
Image caption: Still from JAZZOO, 1966. Directed by John Camie. Original score created by the Oliver Lake Art Quartet. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.